Reigate Revisited
by Regency
Summary: AU of the AU. Mycroft muses over the man he's become. Mummy Holmes reminisces over the boy he was. Sherlock, as ever, wonders where he fits. Sequel to The Reigate Boys.
1. Chapter 1

Author: Regency

Title: Reigate Revisited

Pairing: None

Spoilers: None

Rating: G/Everyone

Summary: AU of the AU. Mycroft muses over the man he's become. Mummy Holmes reminisces over the boy he was. Sherlock, as ever, wonders where he fits. Follows _The Reigate Boys_.

Author's Notes: This is an AU of the AU. I originally conceived of Reigate Mycroft's background somewhat differently, but then I became fascinated with examining how a young Mycroft might have coped with being the adoptive elder brother of such a brilliant boy as Sherlock Holmes.

Disclaimer: I don't own any characters recognizable as being from _Sherlock_. They are the property of their actors, producers, writers, and studios, not me. No copyright infringement was intended and no money was made in the writing or distribution of this story. It was good, clean fun.

~!~

All people want to be understood, but perhaps not entirely…

…

John Watson is wearing an abominable holiday jumper that offends Mycroft's sartorial senses as well as his eyes in equal measure. _Why did I encourage Sherlock to bring him along?_

"He doesn't understand it, you know, why you decided to have children. And I have to admit you don't strike me as the paternal sort."

Mycroft merely arches an eyebrow in benign amusement. He had tired of questions regarding his paternal instincts when Ian was a month old and he finally felt secure enough in his son's survival to allow for the distribution of birth announcements. There had been looks then, sidelong glances he ignored and less subtle entreaties made to him in direct conversation, all that seemed to imply the same, that the Ice Man, he of no human emotion, of so little heart, was inappropriate—nay, incapable of raising any creature kinder than a goblin to goodness. Twenty years and four happy boys has evidently left his reputation untarnished.

"Family means a great deal to me, Dr. Watson. Perhaps I merely wanted one to call my own."

…

Mycroft is a man of modest desires. A steady career, which he has nurtured to perfection, his piano finely tuned, and a surfeit of minor interests besides. His research into the nature of man, natural experiments he observes, other matters Sherlock might understand were Mycroft to share them yet cannot because Mycroft won't (his long-quashed tendency to stockpile necessities manifests here now). Beyond those discreet, ambitious joys, Mycroft wants only for the contentment of those he cares for most.

As for himself, his children are the only happiness he has ever found that does not carry a debt.

…

He is twenty-one and mortified that he allowed sentiment to cloud good sense and whatever will he do with a child, alone at that, and his career his dreams his hopes…Nine months of madness surges past in search of one infinitesimal moment of grace: The boy has his eyes. Afterwards, Mycroft breathes, he plans. Better still, he muddles through. There is a world to change and, finally, a reason to begin.

He is twenty-four and holding a new-born who has his chin and his long toes.

He is twenty-eight and bouncing a scowling infant who hates the tickle monster but loathes when Mycroft turns its loving wrath upon anyone else.

He is thirty-one and keeping vigil over twins, a boy and girl, who fight valiantly to live when a traitor who'd infiltrated the Home Office's internal staff had bid them die.

He is thirty-two and placing hydrangeas over a tended grave to soothe a solemn, lonesome son who no longer cries when he decides that four is enough.

…

Mycroft and Mummy drink in the warm indoors whilst his sons wage a snowball war against an army doctor and his consulting detective in the courtyard. John directs Sherlock's energies to fortifying their defences and launches offensive volleys under his own power. Lysander, observing from the rear, analyses their opposition to mimic and improve upon their battle strategy. Ian applies his brother's recommendations in his precise way, reinforcing their wintry foxhole against the possibility of guerrilla tactics. Cavendish is charged with keeping them in ammunition. Baz crows imminent victory over the battlements to demoralize their enemies amid a bevy of creative profanity for his own amusement.

Mummy is shaking her head affectionately in response to the latter when Mycroft realizes how strategic it had been for his mother to suggest outdoor activities for the others with Mycroft on the verge of a head cold.

"The ladies at the Office are always jealous when I tell them stories about the boys." There is no need to specify which office his mother means. By its vagueness, its import is implied, and his mother has offices _everywhere._ "Few of their children are so well settled in their careers that they can begin thinking of purchasing homes much less settling down to family."

Mycroft drinks his mulled wine expectantly. His mother's words carry weight behind them, she will need to ease the burden of them soon.

"I always wondered why you started so young."

"Youth is usually cause enough for an act of indiscretion."

"The one, I'll grant. Less so, four in short order. You learn from mistakes, Mycroft, you don't repeat them."

He takes care not to crush his glass as he sets it down on the finely crafted table top. It had been a gift from Father, the first of many Mycroft had seen exchanged between the two before his father's death.

"I do not look upon my children as mistakes." He laces his fingers together to set underneath his chest. "Each of them was chosen in their time and they are very much loved, I assure you."

"As were you."

Mycroft allows for a bland smile in reply. "I'm well aware of that. I was very fortunate that you and Father were prepared to welcome a child into your home when I was in need of one. I'm unsure what would have become of me had I remained in the children's home."

He doesn't dwell on his origins often. It doesn't do to look back on might-have-beens. His parents had been clever anarchist ne'er-do-wells who had eschewed wealth and made enemies and set no contingencies for their young son when mortality snagged at brilliance's shins. They had lived rather as Sherlock was wont to do, surviving on adrenalin and stardust, sparkling so brightly they failed to realize they were not guiding stars meant to light the way home but fuses set to expire in a sudden, violent conflagration in the dark.

He was only two.

Very little of them survives in his memory, save for the smell of gunpowder and talcum on gentle scarred hands, a hint of citrus on a delicate neck. He has never known his biological parents, really, but he found in the days after Sherlock was born that he came to miss them all the same.

"How many years," his living mother asks, "have you sat convinced you were the cuckoo child in our robins' nest?"

He blinks once, twice. "Pardon?"

"You were bright even as a baby," she retorts in lieu of explanation.

He permits her to ignore the fact that she only met him at three years of age when his lack of stability had left him hoarding food and hissing at any hands that reached for him. He was no baby in Great-Gran-Mere Vernet's antique cradle. He'd been much too big for it by the time Mummy and Father had taken him in. Sherlock had been a perfect fit. He had made rapturous ruin of a number of cherished family heirlooms before he bothered to string a full sentence together, all of which a young Mycroft had made innumerable futile efforts to repair. His adoptive relations had laughed for they had newer and better things to bequeath unto the young hellion. But Mycroft had known even then how easily beautiful things could be lost and failed to share their mirth.

"I was barely verbal, withdrawn, and overweight," he reminds Mummy. He takes refuge in fact, not frivolities. Fanciful recreations make him wish and wishes rarely count for much in retrospect.

"You were a ravenous bibliophile. You hoarded books. The moment one was given to you, you tucked it out of sight, worried somebody would snatch it from you before you got to the best part." Mummy had fretted over his distrustful tentativeness until he was eight when Sherlock's rebellions began to impact the world around him, leaving her nerves taut for a different cause.

"It's all the best part."

She smiles at him as if he's said something magical and perhaps, in her mind, he has.

"I thought you had adjusted. Sherlock was born and you became the consummate elder sibling. You entertained him, you taught him, protected him. He worshiped you."

"Children are predisposed to revere what, who they see each day. Familiarity, closeness, affection, it's all of a piece to filial camaraderie."

Mummy inhales the sweetened steam rising from her cider. "You were such a curious boy at first." She lowers her cup, her eyes alight. "Do you remember the story of the Catacomb Killer?"

Mycroft's smile is more genuine once he calls to mind three evenings in the summer of his fifth year where his mother perched beside him in a scraggly tree to share her history. The Catacomb Killer was the height of her professional career. A perspicacious mind concealed by a meticulous butcher's sleight of hand.

"Notes in the manner of receipts for goods sold were lodged in the ocular orbits of two underground corpses, and in the skeletal gullet of another; a macabre system of accounting."

"Bodies dismembered and wrapped like parcels for the cooking matching those descriptions." She brushes her fingers across her lip, a habit Sherlock in his teeming unconscious had latched onto as a babe and not outgrown.

Three of these grotesque deliveries had been made to the Vernet apartments in Paris where Mummy had resided when Father was on diplomatic missions abroad. There had been no children, then. _For the best. Sherlock might have tried to keep the evidence._

"The hand-notated receipts were peerless imitations, so pristinely done they seemed more fabrication than genuine article."

"A butcher exhibiting that level of experience would scrawl out of habit, as a doctor's signature or a celebrity's becomes less distinguishable with time," he continues in her stead.

"Someone who would want us to think they were very good."

"Perhaps even _too _good," he confirms, tilting his head as he recalls the particulars of the case once again.

"A cunning bit of misdirection. I was impressed."

That she still is, is not her secret alone. _Sherlock came by his intellectual fancies naturally._ Mycroft had discovered his own through trial and error.

"You stopped being curious when Sherlock was born and started pulling strings. You ceased to ask me questions in order to perform your own investigations. You became indispensable as a minder instead of merely my son." She angles her neck just so and Lysander appears in her silhouette, fraught with a riddle that won't be solved by intellect alone.

"You must admit Sherlock required the additional supervision."

The giggle that erupts from her lips begins in her chest and rises. "Not so different from the present-day. But he has his minder now and you're on to raising a clan of him."

Mycroft savours his drink, the headiness of it, the faint smokiness, its inherent sweetness coating his palate. He basks in it as he does little else.

"I very much doubt that." He doesn't, he knows. The only family he's known has imprinted on him and obliterated all but traces of what came before.

"They would be no less welcome at my table were they your father's like or you mother's."

Mycroft wafts the fruited fragrance of his mulled wine toward himself as he might with any vino of good vintage. That he inhales too much will account for the burning in his eyes.

She grasps his narrow wrist. "Forty years, _mon cœur_, and you're still waiting for us to give you back."

"I have always been able to rely on my own company. It has yet to fault me." While Mycroft Holmes does not need other people, there are those he would care to keep close by.

Inside his wrist, she taps away at his pulse point like a waltz of thumbs on the heel of his palm.

"Many young birds fall from their nests and plummet to their deaths. You leapt out and flew off to build your own thinking yourself an intrusion. You were never an intrusion, neither before Sherlock nor after, and you needn't have built a wall of hatchlings around yourself to prove it."

Mycroft swallows his wine to the last dram. He is bad at these encounters, you see. His children come equipped with hearts inclined to give him leave in emotional matters. An embrace to speak what endearments fumble on his tongue, a kiss on the brow to quiet restless sleep; Machiavellian pragmatism conveys comfort enough most days. He does not blame his parents for leaving him small and doubting, only for his inability to believe that those he loves in life will stay.

"Just when I think I've got you and your brother figured out you surprise me one last time."

"I should think there's little you don't know about me anymore."

"You're a keeper of secrets and I uncover them. Christmas dinners would become dreadfully boring should that ever change."

"It's to the good that I'm something of a connoisseur of mysteries, then."

"Rather like your mother that way," she remarks cheekily.

"So I am," he chuckles in return.

She rises to refresh their beverages, pausing only to press a kiss to his hair as she passes. There are six glasses more to pour for the battle outside has been won by experience over logic, and the poor sportsmanship is audible for miles. _Trust Mummy to know what's needed._

His mother is not only better at mysteries than either of her sons, she is better at love.

And Mycroft knows, as he has always done, that he is very lucky indeed.


	2. Chapter 2

The children have trouped off with Amelie, the groundskeeper's daughter, to see what treasures the Estate hides with John along to supervise. Mycroft has taken the opportunity to catch up on work and Sherlock has made the uncharacteristic decision to linger.

"She never asks when I'll have children," Sherlock remarks apropos of nothing.

"I rather think she's given up all hope on that front." Moreover, Mycroft has children enough for two brothers.

"She likes you best."

Humming noncommittally, Mycroft continues to skate through his inbox aware though he is that Sherlock is doing the same over his shoulder. His brother is liable to stride off in a strop if denied, and even if invited, so Mycroft leaves him to choose his mood.

Sherlock taps rudely at the screen. "You've a mole. Eastern European I'd wager from the pattern of typos in his official correspondence. Dispatch him, he's found something and is preparing to deliver to his contacts abroad."

Mycroft deduced as much three messages ago. "Thank you."

"You disagree that Mummy prefers you." Having endured a lifetime of conversational tangents, Mycroft is unmoved by the subject change.

"The notion that Mummy has ever set us in direct competition is absurd."

"I used to think you put on an act to spite me. You must have seen how she talked you up to the _Préfet de police_. She wanted you to follow in her footsteps, not me." His moue of disdain is run through with petty jealousy. The only consulting detective in the world was a lonely child years before he became a lonely man. _Before John Watson cured him of that._

"I daresay she's awed and inspired to have garnered your interest in the end. She's proud of your accomplishments, Sherlock. As am I."

Sherlock wrings his hands into snarls. "Cavendish has expressed in interest in my work."

"Has he?" Cavendish is the intellectual equivalent of a chamois; any lesson that can be taught, he craves to learn. Nevertheless, Mycroft had expected Lysander to be the more willing participant.

His brother gazes at him stonily, comprehending his lack of surprise. "He's spoken to you about it."

"He has."

"Are you opposed?"

"Provided you keep him safe from the criminal element, I've no objections." The head of the Holmes family's security detail will not be so sanguine. "Does your Dr. Watson agree?"

Sherlock finds a chair to languish upon. "Why do you insist on calling him mine?"

"Why do you insist on pretending not to enjoy the assignments I offer?"

He sneers, "Government work. Dull."

"Everything is dull in your eyes, brother."

His younger brother flings his pyjama-clad legs upon the countertop to rankle him.

"Must you behave as though you were raised by wolves?"

"They would have been more interesting."

Mycroft was born of comets and powder keg, Sherlock of amethyst and cordite. He very much doubts wolves could have given them anything more.

"I should tell Mummy you said that."

He draws his wayward limbs back to him.

"Don't."

"I think I shall."

"Mycroft…don't!"

"You sounded pleased with yourself. I'm quite sure she'd be entertained."

Sherlock glowers, offended as a cat dipped in the bath. "Name your price."

"Find my spy."

Sherlock sniffs. "Boring."

Mycroft stands. Mummy would be in her study this time of day tending to calls from nervy statesman and humble but ambitious police persons throughout the EU. Evelyn Vernet's expertise did not expire when she drawered her warrant card.

"Mycroft…" Sherlock trails him through the manor, a wary ghost on bare feet. Hair in his eyes, he is much his four-year-old self tripping on his elder brother's heels.

He has only a moment to prepare as Sherlock springs forward and dashes around him to reach the ground level study first.

"Mummy!"

Mycroft grabs Sherlock by his ragged dressing gown to keep his fabulist of a younger sibling from getting to vie for their mother's sympathy first.

"Oh no you don't!"

They fall into something of a juvenile tussle that involves no move more cumbersome than a chokehold for all that it keeps them each incapacitated on the area rug. Sherlock is sinewy gristled muscle but Mycroft is more in limbs. He learned to fight very early when 'orphan' was the watchword 'freak' would become.

"What is the meaning of this?"

They fall into a slack pile of harmlessness which fools no one less than their mother.

Mummy stands on the threshold of her office, half-moon spectacles dangling from her fingertips. There is a stern line deepening between her celadon eyes that not even Sherlock's artful disregard can withstand.

"Mycroft started it!"

_Traitor! _

"I did not!"

"The study, now!"

They go peacefully.

She makes them shovel the front walkway and share dishwashing duties after supper. The younger Holmes heirs titter in league with their new co-conspirator, one John Watson, and Mycroft tries to see the humour in it. Once he catches sight the inestimably abhorrent Christmas jumper his mother has procured for Sherlock to wear, he does. John and Sherlock match.

His own gifted jumper shall conveniently be lost in the wash.

…

Mycroft wakes from a sound sleep to a cloudy Boxing Day morning of silence.

Silence…on Boxing Day.

He rises and dresses to the least required to move about the house: his dressing gown tied, his house shoes secure on feet, the matter wiped diligently from rested eyes.

He sidesteps creaking floorboards and skips over loose stairs. He passes empty rooms holding empty beds, save his mother's. She slumbers on in her chaotic sprawl, limbs twisted into the knitted afghan John Watson had unearthed from someplace obscure and gifted to her the evening before.

The sitting room is warm as houses for a roaring fire, its tables boasting hand-drawn blueprints and hurried sketches in multiple biro colours. Chemical equations, redox reactions; mathematical formulae, proofs. Newton's Law of Gravitation sits derived line by line in Sherlock's black spidery scrawl. Cavendish's questioning reconfigurations fill the blanks in red. Lysander's pointed corrections appear blue on the margins. Baz has drawn winking faces in graphite over the lot. The pages show signs of having been crumpled for discarding, folded and creased when retrieved. It seems a universal truth that Holmeses are incapable of leaving well enough alone.

On entering the open kitchen, he finds John beside Ian poring over a first edition of Grey's out of Father's study, comparing it to a disembodied…femur if Mycroft doesn't miss his guess.

"If that is, as I suspect, a human appendage, please dispose of it before Gran-Mere rises for brunch. She may care to investigate."

Cavendish moves to conceal the autopsy tray. Lysander moves ahead of him when his lesser height is of little use as a means of concealment.

"Nothing's the matter, Father," says Lysander who has been known to kick sand in the eye of formality for a trifle.

Sherlock adjusts his protective eyewear, no doubt prepared to that Mycroft hasn't entered the room. Baz lowers the mobile he has been using to record the proceedings. He can be sure that Avra will keep the footage from reaching inappropriate parties. He can also be sure she'll add it to her personal collection. Irreplaceable though she is as an assistant and confidante, he thinks her a rather terrible influence on his sons. _Genius does love an audience._ That she is their intellectual peer only deepens their thrall.

"I would ask why the five of you are packed into the kitchen like sardines, but I don't imagine I'll care for the answer. Do take care not to destroy our ancestral home, Sherlock. I fear there'll be nothing left for my children to inherit should you do so."

"I'd avoid the stables, if you're still attached to those." John is well-mannered enough to exude guilt and mean it.

Mycroft puts fingers to the bridge of his nose in the vain hope of staving off the coming headache. There haven't been horses on the Estate since Sherlock bruised his coccyx attempting to keep up with Mycroft at age eleven. Nevertheless, he had been fond of the safe damp haven he called his own as a boy.

"I once believed you might be helpful in curbing my brother's more outlandish impulses. Wherever did I get that impression?"

The former army doctor hazards a smallish smile. "Haven't a clue."

"Hm, neither do I." He assesses the mess these men have made of his mother's kitchen. "What's all this, then?"

There's a surfeit of silent communication from man to man to man that leaves Mycroft rolling his eyes. He is too capable at deduction to tolerate a poorly-orchestrated lie.

"Borrowed cadaver. Not from St. Bart's. Even Dr. Hooper would strain to make a special delivery during the holidays with family commitments of her own to meet." Sherlock is a magnetic figure, to be sure, but there are lengths to which even his most faithful will not go. "A local scene. Yet, when would there have been time? How would you have been informed?"

Sherlock lifts his head and waits. John Watson's eyes flicker left toward the side exit from the kitchen. That way leads to the Holmes studies, Mummy's locked but aired, and Father's a veritable tomb.

"You answered Mummy's phone. The Reigate constabulary keep her on as an _ad hoc_ police consultant, calling whenever they're out of their depth. You went in her stead." Mycroft draws a finger across his lips. The fallout promises to be magical. He laces his fingers together beneath his chin and swallows a smile. "Well done, _mon frère_."

Sherlock shifts, a flinch of a glare crossing his face pre-emptively. "What for?"

"You know very well."

"She'll be proud."

"Quite."

"I solved it."

Lysander intones, "Not bloody likely. You thought the body was dismembered by a bone saw when it was obviously a circular table saw."

"I got there in the end," Sherlock retorts, acerbically.

"You had help. That's cheating." Lysander takes a poor view of academic dishonesty having been frequently accused of it when his classwork found him achieving a wealth of perfect marks.

Sherlock tries to regain his footing, a flush taking his ears. "It's consulting."

"The consulting detective consults children? That's impressive."

"Piss off."

"You first!"

_Too much alike, the both of them._ Baz is recording their byplay. John and Ian have resumed their study. Cavendish stands on tiptoes to see what the doctors see.

"The method of disposal is immaterial," Sherlock contends. "It's time of death that clinched it. Tell them I'm right, Mycroft."

"I'll need more information to make that determination."

Baz celebrates his vicarious triumph in a gyrating dance he is never permitted to performance in proximity to the Queen. Mycroft lets him get on with it. He doesn't exist to police the boy in his every pursuit. Not when it puts Sherlock in a tizzy that isn't Mycroft's to resolve.

"On mornings like this, I'm quite sure I've awoken in a Wes Anderson film."

He swivels on a dime. Mummy is dressed for brunch, fingers twitching in search of a coffee black as death.

"Gran-mere, can we visit the morgue?" Cavendish asks, forthright and guileless in a way that will continue to be effective long after it ought not to be.

She switches on the French press for coffee and retrieves the kettle for tea. Mycroft makes a note to call the groundkeeper's daughter to invite her round for the meal to come.

"Food first, then we solve crime."

On this point, the lot agree.

They nosh, they drink, they solve cold cases where others might play Cluedo. All in all, it's a rather nice holiday for all that everything remains the same.


	3. Chapter 3

Mycroft's mobile sounds at the receipt of a text on their first night back in London proper.

Penelope has overseen the late delivery Bayard's birthday gift. His second son was born two days before year's end, and celebrations of his birthday tend to be subsumed under Christmas cheer and New Year's Day. Baz, for all his potty-mouthed antics, is a reasonable enough lad and he gave up all pretence offense at having his day forgotten in grade school. Mycroft tends to think that's more a matter of realizing his father's guilt at overlooking the occasion during busier years results in grander rewards.

_The Prince_ had been his childish fairy tale and Holmeses learn from history and parables alike. That Mycroft is cognizant of these manoeuvrings does not render them ineffective.

Mycroft carefully wraps the security-enhanced Blackberry in a pristine white box. It is a sign of his faith and trust, the keys to the kingdom if you will. Penelope had chosen the trinket and he had approved. She is a rather deft hand at wrangling him as well, he supposes, and finds that he doesn't mind. She is daughter and sister and something altogether more entwined in ten years than he has allowed himself to be with another in forty-one. He has learned not to question it.

He departs his office to find that Penelope and Bayard have commandeered the kitchen for a workshop. Never mind that there is an entire level designated for tinkering and experimentation, Pen and Baz prefer to be where any action originates, usually not much distant from his study. There is a server being built from the ground up where he makes his coffee. He goes without to avoid disturbing them. The upstairs beckons in prickling banter and defensive rejoinders. _Sherlock and Sherwin in one room. Will wonders never cease?_

Sherlock has become a reluctant staple in the household. When his cases for New Scotland Yard fail to keep his attention and John is off out or refusing to entertain him, he can be found bowed over petri dishes or prodding through foliage inside the insectariums holding Lysander and Cavendish's latest creations.

Sherlock ignores Mycroft when he appears at the entrance of their improvised laboratory. Common as it is, Mycroft can't suppress an eye roll. Ian inclines his head in greeting from a corner where he practices sutures on a disembodied torso. His residential facilities are an improvement from the poor refrigeration offered at Baker Street, yet he hopes he is never subject to one of Lestrade's infernal drugs busts just the same. He isn't sure how he'd explain the human remains.

Sherlock taps his chin before turning to address Mycroft's second youngest to his left. "What modification did you make to specimen 6c?"

Lysander consults their log. "The position 18 substitution, guanine."

"The wings are misshapen."

"Functional?" He cants his head to squint through the greenery.

"Not as yet. Give them time." Sherlock flips through one of the small Moleskins the younger ones have come to keep as lab journals and jots down an additional note. "We'll want to see if they're sterile."

"What about the embryonic specimen?" Cavendish is still learning to bend his vocal chords to the complex terminology Sherlock demands. He is succeeding at besting Sherlock's indifferent opinion. But then, Sherlock has more respect for daunted but dauntless children than jeering adults; he understands.

"The DNA polymerase you've devised is adequate for the current trial."

"How can we improve it?"

"I've taken steps. See here…"

Sherlock lifts Cavendish so that he may peer into the eyepiece of the microscope over a glass slide. Lysander watches the screen that magnifies the view by a factor of one thousand.

_They'll be published by Cavendish's eleventh birthday._ He doesn't think they'll need his intervention to see his prediction come to fruition.

Content, he sees himself out.

Mycroft calls them down to dinner once the caterer has delivered. His preference for homemade fare is impractical in the face of conflicting schedules and picky appetites. They order ahead and eat by preordained schedule, gorging themselves on leftovers as disgruntled stomachs turn them from their respective areas of concern. Birthdays, to his shame, are no exception. The Work does not take a holiday.

Dinner is Turkish food for Baz's palate, downed with mango lassi. They opt to forego singing for everyone's good. Musicality is an umpteenth guest at a dinner table featuring two sopranos, a violinist, a bassoonist, and a pianist, nevertheless they are philosophers first and performers last. They forego the singing in favour of devil's-food cake. No one protests, not even Sherlock, who usually grunts about stunted brainwork and sluggishness.

Mycroft bestows his gift unto Bayard and watches his eyes light up in elation as, once unboxed, he scrolls through his new device. He has gained access to innumerable agency databases as well as a cultivated listing of non-government contacts. With it he may make a Prime Minister out of Bartleby, or he may render him obsolete.

"Wha…Da, I don't deserve this."

"You do. Penelope and I are agreed. You've comported yourself well."

"He means you haven't managed to offend Her Majesty the Queen and dishonour our family name."

"We can't all be you, Uncle."

Baz and Ian bump fists and Sherlock almost kicks Ian's chair from under him before the last consonant dies. They've been at steady odds since Sherlock became a readier presence in the house. Sherlock might protest that he is not the firstborn, but he takes on the role easily enough to cast his assertion into question. Ian is not yet accustomed to deferring.

"That will be enough of that. It's Baz's night."

"He started it."

Ian scoffs. "You must be joking. You are joking. You're a walking joke."

"Behave or take yourselves elsewhere."

It's just as well that Sherlock's mobile pings before he has to send his eldest to separate corners; Sherlock is more likely to flee to a distant roof than comply.

"It's Lestrade," Sherlock reveals.

Two heads swing toward Mycroft in unspoken pleading. A third does a poor job at suppressing the question.

Ian rolls his eyes and props his textbook open. "Get out already, you're putting me off."

Eyes narrowed, Sherlock pilfers Ian's book from under his nose. Baz lifts Sherlock's mobile in retaliation. Lysander filches Baz's Blackberry as comeuppance. Ian outright snatches both from hands and flees into the depths of the house, cackling his superiority.

The entire act had been a ploy. The remaining boys stand in awe—not Ian, reliable, unshakeable Ian—before they give chase, all puppy feet and sharpish elbows. Cavendish, though not part of the melee, gleefully follows. After all, it would never do to let his brothers run without him.

Mycroft huffs a laugh as he watches them go. It is rather wonderful to have them all home.

"Should I warn the Inspector," Penelope asks from his side.

"I think that would be wise."

He goes in search of his umbrella and coat, and summons the driver.

The game is on.


End file.
